Posted on 03/21/2011 9:58:48 AM PDT by dbehsman
Former PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers is at it again, agitating against Republicans for daring to oppose National Public Radio subsidies. In the latest installment (with Michael Winship) on The Huffington Post, Moyers concluded with a quote illustrating "the importance of a public media whose obligation is not to a political or corporate paymaster, but to the integrity of the work and the trust of the listener." NPR, he claimed, was like Kennedy's tribute to the poet Robert Frost:
"The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state," Kennedy said. "... In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having 'nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.'"
NPR is somehow against intrusive, meddlesome government? Moyers insists that somehow public broadcasting is the only media check on the conservative movement in America. Those other private networks don't seem to be any help to liberals at all.
Republicans, we're told, are on a crusade "to feed red meat to Fox News and the partisan talk radio hosts who have turned the public airwaves -- remember, the airwaves above our fair and bountiful land belong to you, Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. America -- into a right-wing romper room."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
NPR relies on consensus (snicker) instead of logic for its political opinions and is extremely boring in its delivery of those opinions.
But maybe that’s why Moyers calls it art instead of informative and accurate.
Lol — good point.
Moyers was too dumb to watch Romper Room
I went to Museum of Natural History in NYC some time ago.
Saw beautiful gilded medieval tapestries and fabulous paintings & sculptures from the European Masters. Truly, it was eye-popping stuff, Mrs WBill liked one of the tapestries so much that we have a lithograph of it hanging in our house.
They also had a much-ballyhooed "African History Exhibit". Lots and lots of advertising in and around the museum, ads on the radio, ads on the TV. Whole lot of dollars (taxpayer dollars? dunno) trumpeting this thing. Mrs WBill and I succumbed to the ad blitz and checked it out.
It looked like a 1st grade art project. Couple of crude masks, a few pieces of wood with pigment smeared on them, and a stick with some feathers tied to one end. My 5 year old has a number of the same types of things on his "art bench" in my garage.
Much like your example. Needless to say, we were less than impressed. Sez me, "This is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it".
/rant off. Thanks for Listening.
If NPR is the champion of the individual mind and sensibility against society and the state, then I’m the queen of England. NPR IS society and (more importantly) the state.“The artist...becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state”
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.Society is not the same thing as government - not at all. At least, not assuming that freedom exists.Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. Common Sense
Yeah, those nasty, evil conservative talk shows. They knock down your doors, tie you up, turn on the radio and force you to listen to them. How awful. (smirk)
“True believers in the god of the market would leave us to the ruthless cruelty of unfettered monopolistic capital where even the law of the jungle breaks down.”
— Bill Moyers, Keynote speech to the Environmental Grantmakers Association, October 16, 2001
Complains against capitalism and fossil fuels while his foundation, the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, owns millions worth of investments in oil, natural gas, and coal firms.
Bill Moyers, his son John, and their moneyed sidekicks, the Schumann brothers, hate the free market with intemperate ferocity, as the quote above suggests. They spend millions inherited from an IBM founder and a president of the General Motors Acceptance Corporation to tear down America’s free market economy. They have their hands in many pies. Here are some.
Triple roles: journalist, advocate, financier
Bill Moyers:
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), The money, the message, and the messenger. Conflict of interest?
The Florence and John Schumann Foundation,
renamed The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy
President (part time, 1998 salary $100,043, benefits $4,626. 2007 salary $25,100)
Former board of directors member, George Soros’ Open Society Institute.
Bill’s background: was Deputy Director of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy Administration and Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963-1967. He was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation for 12 years, and currently serves as president of The Florence and John Schumann Foundation.
Bill’s money: For the post-show panel, Moyers chose Kenneth A. Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a rabidly anti-capitalist group funded by big foundations, including Moyers’ Florence and John Schumann Foundation.
Moyers acknowledged that he had given a “small grant” to EWG (In fact it was four grants, $225,000 in 1989, $35,000 and $50,000 in 1995, and $15,000 in 1999, for a total of $325,000 - a third of a million isn’t “small” to most of us).
Moyers also had Dr. Phil Landrigan, a pediatrician and chairman of preventive medicine from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In his on-air introduction of Landrigan, Moyers failed to mention that the doctor is also a long-time activist with Physicians for Social Responsibility, an anti-corporate advocacy group.
Both Cook and Landrigan had advance knowledge of the show’s subject matter.
The chemical industry was represented by two men who had no advance knowledge of the show’s contents.
The Schumann Foundation gets the money for its environmental grants in large part from investments in oil and gas companies, according to its most recent available tax returns:
2000 shares of British Petroleum;
5,000 shares Columbia Gas Systems;
4,200 shares Conoco, Inc.;
3,900 shares Keyspan Energy (natural gas distribution);
10,000 shares Noble Affiliates (oil & gas exploration and development);
10,200 shares Pioneer Natural Resource Company (oil & gas exploration and development);
10,000 shares Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (Royal Dutch / Shell Oil holding company);
10,000 shares Shell Transportation and Trading Company (another Royal Dutch / Shell Oil holding company); plus
12,500 shares of Ford Motor Company.
Son of Bill
John Moyers:
The Florence and John Schumann Foundation, Executive Director (salary $85,000, benefits $22,228)
The Florence Fund, Executive Director
TomPaine.com (website project of Florence Fund)
During coverage of the 2004 presidential election, Moyers stated, “I think that if Kerry were to win this in a tight race, I think that there would be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. I mean that the right wing is not going to accept it.”
a July 13, 2007, edition of Bill Moyers Journal discussed the possible impeachment of then-President George W. Bush and featured guests from opposing ends of the political spectrum that both supported impeachment
On August 16, 2007, Moyers stated that Karl Rove was a secular skeptic and agnostic who had manipulated the Christian right for partisan purposes.
After Moyers wrote an essay criticizing Israel’s role in the Gaza War, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Moyers accusing him of “anti-Semitism” and “ignorance” for suggesting that Jews were “genetically coded” for violence.
Moyers married Judith Suzanne Davidson (a producer) on December 18, 1954. They have three children and five grandchildren. His son William Cope Moyers (CNN producer, Hazelden Foundation spokesman) struggled to overcome alcoholism.
His other son, John Moyers, assisted in the foundation of TomPaine.com, “an online public affairs journal of progressive analysis and commentary”, funded in significant measure by his father, as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy foundation.
The Intolerable Smugness of Bill Moyers
He just can’t help himself.
By Jack Shafer
Updated Monday, Feb. 23, 2009
[Moyers’] part in Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover’s bugging of Martin Luther King’s private life, the leaks to the press and diplomatic corps, the surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic Convention, and his request for damaging information from Hoover on members of the Goldwater campaign suggest he was not only a good soldier but a gleeful retainer feeding the appetites of Lyndon Johnson.
http://www.slate.com/id/2211601/
When Moyers was Johnson’s press secretary, he believed that journalists existed to serve the president. James Deakin writes in Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House and the Truth that Johnson’s assistant press secretary Joe Laitin told Moyers that it was OK to plant a question with reporters every once in a while at presidential news conferences. A bogus idea, for sure, but Laitin thought the technique was useful in getting important information out. “When [the president] volunteers something, everybody immediately is on guard: what’s he trying to sell?” Laitin told Deakin.
Moyers pitched the idea of planting questions to Johnson, who embraced it, giving Moyers a couple of questions for Laitin to distribute, which he did.
Johnson so loved this innovation that he was determined to plant every question at his next news conference. About 15 minutes before the session started, Moyers brought Laitin about 10 questions from the president. When Laitin protested that this was too much—”Bill, this isn’t the way it’s done”—Moyers said, “Do it!”
“The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility”
Well, NPR certainly did not become the champion of Juan Williams’ individual mind and sensibility.
I wouldn’t exactly consider Michelangelo’s art to be the product of capitalism. While renaissance Italy is considered to be the first great flowering of the modern Western market order, indeed Florence was a vibrant merchantile power, and Michelangelo’s family can be said to be middle-class, it wasn’t exactly the free market supporting him. He got that in the form of patronage from the church and nobility, both of which can in a sense be classed as (kinda sorta) government.
Though not the central government, which is what we’re talking about with the NEA. So nevermind.
“so why is ‘art’ always with a left wing bias?”
It wasn’t, always. More and more that was the case since the Romantic age, with the fetish for originality and the avant-garde. But the avalanche came with the Modern era, which not ironically coincided with art’s appeal narrowing to a tiny, esoteric elite, who are somehow able to convince big money men to continue piss away tankers-full of money on it.
And of course, the more bias Moyers has shown, the more errors he's made, the more cheap shots he's taken over the years, the higher he's going to get up on his moral high horse and play the Great Moral Teacher of Us All.
It would be funny, though, if this all turned out to be a hoax. James O'Keefe or Greg Gutfeld or even Garrison Keillor spreading "fake but accurate" Moyers's quotes.
Sadly, though, it looks real. Moyers is just that pretentious.
“Society is not the same thing as government”
I never said it was. If I implied it, that’s because they are on a certain level inseperable. But that’s not my main point. What I want to get across is that the sort of mindset currently governing NPR and the state alike—let’s call it the NPR mindset (i.e. contemporary American moderate leftism—also happens to be immensely culturally influential.
This is not to say the government itself, to say nothing of NPR itself, is the source of said influence. Government is of course ubiquitous, stretching way beyond its just limits. In some cases, for instance via the schools, it almost seems our society’s most important institution, more important to some even than family. But that, again, is not the main point. The main point is that the very same mindset behind the state is also dominates NPR, journalism in general, all forms of popular culture (music, tv, movies, fashion, advertising), high culture (the visual arts [painting, sculpture, architecture], literature, fine music [opera, etc.]), academia, corporate culture, charitable organizations and foundations, mainline churches, unions, and so on. Basically, every single institution responsible for diffusing ideas—that is, the intellectual community—is controlled by the NPR mindset.
That’s what I was getting at by saying NPR is society. Obviously, though, countless other mindsets permeate culture. This is especially true on the internet. One big alternate mindset, which according to its political aspect we might term conservatism, has its various cultural tentacles: in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and so forth. From there you could go down the list, from libertarians and hardcore environmentalists to commies and anarchists to white supremacists and black nationalists.
So, yes, the NPR mindset is not society itself. However, counting government with nearly the entire mainstream non-internet intellectual world, it’s still pretty damn close.
“Society is not the same thing as government”
So, yes, the NPR mindset is not society itself. However, counting government with nearly the entire mainstream non-internet intellectual world, it’s still pretty damn close.
I never said it was. If I implied it, that’s because they are on a certain level inseperable. But that’s not my main point. What I want to get across is that the sort of mindset currently governing NPR and the state alike—let’s call it the NPR mindset (i.e. contemporary American moderate leftism—also happens to be immensely culturally influential.
Actually, the mindset of "objective" wire service journalism is precisely the definition of liberalism - for the simple reason that "liberalism" was the American creed of the promotion of liberty - until journalism redefined it into the first successful brand for socialism in America in the 1920s (date per Safire's New Political Dictionary).Journalism only awards positive labels to people who agree with journalism's perspective, and journalism's perspective is that talk is superior to action, and nothing actually matters except PR. So getting a positive label from journalism is the mark of the toady; "liberals" say things which help promote journalism, and journalists respond by saying positive things about "liberals." "Liberals" promote the idea that "society" means nothing other than government.
“’liberals’ say things which help promote journalism, and journalists respond by saying positive things about ‘liberals.’”
That’s not it, exactly. Journalists themselves are liberals. So of course they say positive things about liberals, as they are in effect patting themselves on the back.
“’Liberals’ promote the idea that ‘society’ means nothing other than government.”
To put my main point in other, simpler, words, yes, they do. Which is precisely why the word “public” denotes government. You havbe liberals promoting this idea, and as I’ve indicated they have control of most, though not all . Then you have the Leviathan itself, operating under the same illusions as the masters of culture, stretching its Mr. Fantastic limbs into every aspect of society. Together they make it so that the NPR mindset is not all of society, but quite a large portion of it.
I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:
- objective :
- reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists who are members in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)
- liberal :
- see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
- progressive :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- moderate:
- see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
- centrist :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- conservative :
- rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")
- right-wing :
- see, "conservative."
The first clue that someone is NOT enlightened is when they tell you they are.
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